VR

The BAFTAs are set to take place this Sunday, hosted by Joanna Lumley with EE as the headline sponsor. Which is great! Good for them. What's more interesting at this point, however, is that EE will be commemorating the occasion with a brand new 360-degree movie trivia quiz show - also hosted by Lumely. Read More >>

VirZOOM, a VR/fitness firm, wants to get you off that couch and into a calorie-burning virtual reality. The Massachusetts-based startup is selling a new series of stationary bikes that sync with VR headsets to immerse players in elaborate fantasy scenarios as they cycle. On the one hand, fitness is important. On the other, look at this shit.Read More >>

People only really care about the Winter Olympics when Cool Runnings is on, or if the host being accused of corruption and human rights abuses. Maybe because snow-based sports aren't that exciting and non-Canadian people don't have as much interest in them. Read More >>

In her book The Imagineers of War, author Sharon Weinberger recounts one of the first deployments of simulation training: to improve America’s performance in a NATO mock tank battle that the US consistently performed poorly in, nicknamed the Canadian Army Trophy. After implementing DARPA’s rudimentary gaming-as-training regimen, the US won. Three decades later, the US Ski and Snowboard Association is using VR training in what could serve as a repeat of that result. Read More >>

As the biggest porn site on the internet, Pornhub already dominates the landscape when it comes to what people get off to. Now the company is also making a push to control how people get off, with a new line of interactive sex toys that sync with Pornhub videos. Read More >>

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Facebook, as a company, is meant to be an innovator in fields beyond surveillance. But the announcement that it has created an entirely new unit of time is a nice reminder that the enormous company, which owns both WhatsApp and Oculus VR, is more than just one of the largest spy apparatuses in history. Read More >>

Every now and then, human beings can be pretty swell. Earlier in the week a gamer suffered a seizure in VR Chat, and was immediately comforted by a group of concerned bystanders on the virtual reality social platform. Read More >>

When the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive came out in 2016, we entered a new era of virtual reality. No longer would people think of half-assed fever dreams like Lawnmower Man, or ambitious but profound failures like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy anytime VR gets mentioned. Even so, modern VR still hasn’t caught on. It’s awkward, it’s expensive, and most of the games and apps still feel like tech demos. But earlier this week, a new piece of VR tech reminded me why the headsets are much more than gimmicks. Read More >>

Back in the 90s, companies tried making virtual reality a thing, most notably Nintendo, whose Virtual Boy was so distasteful that it caused people to abandon the entire category for the next 20 years. But then in 2016, headsets from Oculus and HTC/Vive showed that the VR experiences people had been writing about in scifi books for years were finally within our reach. Read More >>

As I powered up the PSVR to play the recently released Skyrim VR, I wondered whether this was yet another company’s lazy cash grab exploiting a new tech fad, or a genuine new step for the franchise. This was my third first time playing it. First released in 2011, the same exact game now had four releases across half a dozen systems, with only minor graphical upgrades. While the transition from PS3 to PS4 didn’t exactly leave me floored, it seemed the transition to VR could potentially be its most radical reformulation yet. Read More >>

In an infamous Twitter meme that misquotes Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan, naked, blue, and seated in a crater alone on Mars, says: “I am tired of Earth. These people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.” He’s a perfect candidate for Windows 10 Mixed Reality, Microsoft approach to virtual reality, that, starting today, is compatible with SteamVR. Read More >>

Today HTC announced a cool new completely standalone VR headset for China, and then promptly dashed hopes in this hemisphere by confirming the cancellation of the standalone headset intended for US and other Western audiences. If you’re based in the West and want the next wave of VR headsets, then it seems you’re going to need to look elsewhere. Read More >>

Whisper it, but we might be on the cusp of a virtual reality revolution. If Silicon Valley is to believed, though VR has been around in concept for decades, this time we really could be only a few years away from the technology becoming an integral part of our lives. Read More >>

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey’s new tech startup isn’t just trying to ramp up US border security—it seems the company also wants to game-ify war and modernise battlefields with virtual and augmented reality. Read More >>